In the attic where the rain touched the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside, a few inches away, on December nights, A Thousand Times Great Grandmere existed. She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she … existed.
And now with the Great Event about to happen, the Great Night arriving, the Homecoming about to explode, she must be visited!
“Ready? Here I come!” Timothy’s voice cried faintly beneath a trapdoor that trembled. “Yes!?”
Silence. The Egyptian mummy did not twitch.
She stood propped in a dark corner like an ancient dried plum tree, or an abandoned and scorched ironing board, her hands and wrists trussed across her dry riverbed bosom, a. captive of time, her eyes slits of deep blue lapis lazuli behind thread-sewn lids, a glitter of remembrance as her mouth, with a shriveled tongue wormed in it, whistled and sighed and whispered to recall every hour of every lost night four thousand years back when she was a pharaoh’s daughter dressed in spider linens and warm-breath silks with jewels burning her wrists as she ran in the marble gardens to watch the pyramids erupt in the fiery Egyptian air.
Now Timothy lifted the trapdoor lid of dust to call into that midnight attic world. “Oh, Beautiful One!”
